Ticks

I spent this past Saturday soaking up the glorious sunshine on an early season assault of Mount Lady MacDonald in Canmore.  Because my blue heeler mix, Fender, was the only soul that wasn’t too busy or too lazy to come with me, the conversations, though mildly entertaining, were not incredibly riveting.  And so my mind wandered to topics for my next article.  Halfway up the unforgiving mountain I paused for a break on a rock.  As I enjoyed my snack, I debated writing an article on feline diabetes.  Oh, but what a chore that would be!  Diabetes is such an overwhelming, although important, topic.  Fine, feline diabetes it is.

As I bent down to sling my pack back onto my shoulders, I noticed a flicker of movement on my sweater.  A tick.  Ugh!  Nasty little creatures.  But in true Jody style, instead of flicking him from my sweater in disgust, I grabbed my camera to snap a mugshot of the little parasite.  I then hastened his trajectory into the trees.  Prepare to get itchy.

Yes, Alberta does have ticks.  And spring is by far the most active season for these beasts, as the adults emerge and seek out a host through a process called “questing”.  The adult tick grasps the tip of a branch or blade of grass with two hind legs and reaches into the air with its front legs.  As it senses an animal brushing by, it quickly grasps the host’s hairs (or sweater) with its legs and silently hitches a ride. 

Ticks undergo several lifestage changes before graduating to adulthood.  With many species, a six-legged nymph emerges from the egg and “quests” to find a host.  After ingesting several blood meals, the nymph drops to the leaf litter on the ground and moults into an eight-legged nymph, which then reattaches to another host and feeds for several days.  It then drops to the ground again, and moults into an eight-legged adult. 

Female adults have an incomplete outer exoskeleton, or “scutum”, which allows for expansion up to 100 times the tick’s original size as she feeds.  Once the adult female has taken a blood meal, she drops, engorged to roughly the size of a human thumbnail, back into the leaf litter to lay thousands of eggs.  Sadly for the tick (or luckily, depending on your point of view), she doesn’t get to experience the joys (or trials) of motherhood, and dies immediately after laying her eggs. 

If you find yourself following in my footsteps and hiking into the mountains this spring, be sure to check yourself and your pets thoroughly throughout the adventure and after you return home.  Ticks that have found their way onto dogs usually embed their mouthparts under the skin around the face, neck, and ears (on humans, they seek out our warmer, darker areas).  They leave their larger, visible abdomen on the surface.  If you find such a creature on your four-legged hiking companion, you can either bring him to your veterinarian for removal, or, if you are not squeamish, grasp his head firmly with tweezers as close to the dog’s skin as possible.  Pull back very slowly.  If you attempt to remove the tick too briskly, you will end up decapitating him and leaving his mouthparts still in your pet’s skin.  (There is no end to the creepiness of these creatures).  This unplanned outcome is not dangerous, but can lead to a mild infection and irritation. 

If you remove a tick from your pet, bring the tick to your veterinarian for identification.  If your veterinarian is unable to definitively identify the species of tick, he or she can send the tick to the Government of Alberta Tick Surveillance Program – a free program that helps owners of pets and livestock ensure that the ticks they find are not a species known to carry disease. 

There are several species of tick in Alberta.  The little fellow in my photograph, by my best identification abilities, is an adult male Dermacentor variabilis, also known as the American dog tick.  This tick is not dangerous, but it is certainly creepy.  It is not known to carry any diseases, but in large numbers, can cause enough blood loss in wild animals to lead to anemia.  Its close cousin, Dermacentor albipictus, also called the winter tick, is known to exist on moose in such large numbers that the host loses its coat, becomes emaciated and anemic, and dies.  In many cases, there can be 50,000-100,000 ticks on a single moose.  In my final year of veterinary college, I did an autopsy on a moose that had succumbed to winter tick exsanguination.  The entire surface of the moose was encrusted in a thick layer of ticks.  There were ticks on top of ticks, like barnacles on a ship.  Ticks were crawling up the hydraulic hoists and into the rafters and raining down upon us.  It was the stuff of nightmares.

And so you can imagine the startling flashback this little fellow on my sweater gave me on Mount Lady MacDonald.  And, although my initial reaction was to scream and kick my sweater into the depths of the forest, I resisted so that I could calmly capture his photogenic little face on camera for your education and entertainment.  I hope you have enjoyed learning about him.  (I’m itching and scratching like crazy now.  Are you?)